I am a writer and an editor. I've published humor, poetry, nonfiction, reviews, short stories, and a novel. I've edited military history, true crime, novels, and a book about car chases in the movies. I can juggle, but I've never been a mime. I live near the banks of the mighty Mississippi River, fabled in story and song, in personable St. Paul, Minnesota, with my wife, Sandra, and daughter, Ella. There are many things which make me cranky, but ice cream is not one of them.

I fully admit that raising the taxes of the rich will not singlehandedly cure our budget woes. Now I expect in return that conservatives will fully admit that cutting the taxes of the rich will not inherently help our budget woes. I'll wait. Still waiting. Man, it's quiet.

I've encountered conservatives ridiculing liberals as ignorant for thinking raising taxes on the rich will help at all. Then those same conservatives just turn around and recite their own ideological mantra about cutting taxes, because that works "every time" they say.

Really? Every time? Under every circumstance? Always? Maybe on the planet Unicornia where money is magic jelly beans. Sure, under the right circumstances, cutting taxes will lead to investment and jobs, and that growth creates new revenue streams that not only cover the initial tax break but exceed it. Cutting taxes can increase tax revenue. In theory.

But let's look at the real world, the one that exists outside the ghost of Ronald Reagan: a world where U.S. corporations out-source their production to foreign countries with cheap labor while stashing piles of cash in offshore accounts beyond U.S. tax laws. How many well-paying jobs in our own country are going to be created by further cutting taxes on the rich? How much of that tax-cut money will actually stay in the U.S.?

I don't know. And neither do the people who are blindly reciting the "cut taxes on the rich" trope. Don't try to act like financial wizards when you're just saying the same thing you always say. Our troubles are complex, and parroting one-size-fits-all ideology is not what we need to solve them. It was letting the rich do whatever they wanted to try to get even richer that drove our car off the cliff in the first place.

We need considered, nuanced responses to our problems. Ideas, not ideologies. Problem is the entire political process is so compromised by money that I don't know who could come up with sensible answers, much less how they could then actually put a plan in motion.